Tutorial Introduction

Let's begin with practical examples of mdoc.

The intended audience of this part is somebody who has never written a mdoc manual. Although you may be tempted to jump to the chapter relevant to your manual type (for example, a command or function library), it's best to read the chapters in order. I'll explain mdoc syntax as we go.

If you've already written a few manuals, you may want to read this part anyway: beyond explaining technical mdoc language concepts by example, I'll also introduce some best practises and discuss portability between various mdoc environments.

I'll frequently refer to the screen output of mdoc documents as displayed with the UNIX man utility. Furthermore, I'll refer to command invocation in the traditional UNIX way — on the command line. In short, a bit of UNIX knowledge will help to avoid confusion. But I'll briefly introduce invocation syntaxes as the need arises.

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